We decided to start this blog about the transformation Fiber Optic connectivity is undergoing these days in the datacenter space, as well as in carriers’ networks. I won’t deny we think a blog on this topic is an effective marketing tool for the products we make at FiberZone Networks, but for the most part, we want to share with you some of the insights we get going through this transformation, hoping to learn even more through your feedback and participation.
We begin this first post, as many do these days, with the
“transition to the cloud”. When it comes to fiber connectivity, this transition
means that more changes to network capacity and connectivity take place at the
core “cloudy” part of the network, on high-bandwidth links, and for mission-critical
applications. This in turn means that uninterrupted changes to fiber
connectivity mean a great deal more than they used to. The Ponemon Institute analyzed the cost of outages in datacenters in a recent
study, and showed that the cost of a single outage is measured in
thousands-of-dollars-per-minute, and the average time to recover from outage is
about 2.5 hours in fully staffed datacenters.
Consider now that a “private cloud” hosted environment, like
the one shown in the picture below, means that an enterprise IT department no
longer has staff onsite to manage and troubleshoot its IT infrastructure, and
there you have it – IT infrastructure that has to support traffic more valuable
than ever, and deployed in an environment that requires a new approach to
management and control.
Remote management solutions for power and cooling in
datacenters have been introduced over the past several years, and have become mainstream, but the third leg of datacenters’ infrastructure –
IT fiber connectivity, has not been effectively automated, yet! More enterprise
and service provider customers realize that manual operation of fiber
infrastructure can’t scale to meet their growing needs. An extreme, but
real-life, example of how manual fiber connectivity looked like at one of our
customers’ sites before implementing automated fiber management is shown in the
picture below.
We’re also seeing tide shifts in Asia, where unlike in the
case of the early movers in the U.S., deployments of FTTx networks are also
used to serve Small/Medium Businesses (SMBs) and enterprise customers. These
customers require strict high-availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and
service providers build their fiber-optic networks accordingly. China Telecom,
for example, is deploying intelligent fiber connectivity for its FTTx deployment with 20 million
homes passed planned by 2013, quoting that “manual operations [of fiber] incur
high deployment costs and great operations and maintenance pressure for
operators”. We’ve also seen some of the major MSOs in the U.S. make plans to
use EPON architecture to deliver Ethernet services to SMBs, so we may see a similar
trend in the U.S. shortly. We hope to tell you more about developments in
transforming fiber connectivity in this market soon.
We’d like to hear your views and opinions, and I promise
you’ll hear more from us soon!
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